For everyone that was declaring NCsoft "weak" after Richard Garriott's declaration of fraud, you need to have a look at the company's latest earnings report. With Tabula Rasa now gone and buried, the company unleashed an enormous 1Q 2009, riding on the extremely successful launch of Aion. Sales increased year-on-year by 51% and net income grew by a whopping 315%! While these numbers may seem rather large compared to 2008, NCsoft still has more growth potential in 2009 as hundreds of servers in China are now running Aion to the local residents, and these numbers aren't included in the 1Q report. With such a successful launch in Korea and China, NCsoft is extending the Aion property to Japan and North America.

For the North American gamers, some of the most intriguing data comes on the comparison of a country-by-country and game-by-game sales. While North Americans often consider ourselves fairly eager MMO gamers, Japan easily outpaced our sales numbers, gobbling up 18% of the sales compared to NA's measly 8%. On top of that, sales of North American games City of Heroes/Villains and Guild Wars was almost insignificant compared to sales of Lineage, Lineage 2, and Aion.

Strangely, the 1Q of 2009 saw a higher number of sales in CoH/CoV than Guild Wars, but this could be due to the lack of an expansion for the PvP-based title.

There's plenty more information to be gleaned from the report, so feel free to download the whole thing by clicking here!

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